Penn Law faculty top list of best of corporate and securities articles of 2012

May 01, 2013

Penn Law’s business and corporate law faculty have dominated the 19th annual poll of the “Top Ten Corporate and Securities Articles of 2012,” recently conducted by Corporate Practice Commentator. Articles by Professors William Bratton, Michael Wachter, Jill Fisch, and Edward Rock were among the top ten selected by corporate and securities law academics, which were chosen from more than 550 published and indexed in legal journals in 2012.

“Once again this year we had more faculty with top 10 corporate articles, as judged by their peers, than any other law school in the country,” said Michael A. Fitts, Dean of Penn Law. “The Law School’s business and corporate law program is unrivaled among our peers. This latest accomplishment is indicative of our faculty’s expertise, for the benefit of Penn Law and the wider world.”

William Bratton and co-author Michael Wachter’s article, The Political Economy of Fraud on the Market, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. Bratton, the Nicholas F. Galicchio Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Law School’s Institute for Law and Economics (ILE), is recognized internationally as a leading writer on business law. Wachter, the William B. Johnson Professor of Law and Economics and ILE Co-Director, is a prominent cross-disciplinary scholar with current research focusing on topics of the intersection of corporate law and finance. In their article, the authors point out that the fraud on the market class action no longer enjoys substantive academic support. They highlight the sticking points retarding movement toward its abolition and map a plausible route to a superior enforcement outcome.

Jill Fisch is the Perry Golkin Professor of Law and Co-Director of ILE whose work focuses on the intersection of business and law, including the role of regulation and litigation in addressing limitations in the disciplinary power of the capital markets. Fisch was acknowledged for The Destructive Ambiguity of Federal Proxy Access, published by Emory Law Journal. The article focuses on a federal proxy access rule adopted by the SEC in 2010, after almost 70 years of debate. Fisch examines the new rule and concludes that, despite the prolonged rule-making effort, the rule is ambiguous in its application and unlikely to increase shareholder input into the composition of corporate boards.

Edward Rock L’83, the Saul A. Fox Distinguished Professor of Business Law, writes on corporate law and corporate governance. His article, Shareholder Eugenics in the Public Corporation in the Cornell Law Review maintains that the match between shareholders and public corporations can potentially affect firm value and examines the extent to which publicly held corporations can shape their shareholder base.